Remembrance Today: Poppies, grief and herosim. Photo: Photo: Janet McKnight / flickr CC.
Remembrance today
Richard Place reflects on an important and challenging book about war, remembrance, poppies, grief and heroism
Autumn rushes ever onwards. The weather has changed. The leaves that gave such a brilliant display of colour only a few days ago are now cascading down like the poppies at the Festival of Remembrance in the Albert Hall. Remembrance Sunday has gone with its solemnity, ceremony and massed crowds at the Cenotaph. So, before our Christmas preparations take over completely, it is perhaps appropriate to read and consider the questions raised in Ted Harrison’s book Remembrance Today: Poppies, grief and herosim.
Too young for National Service, the author was for many years a BBC news and current affairs reporter and in that time witnessed fighting, saw the consequences of war at first hand and ‘met many military and civilian victims of warfare destined to carry the physical and mental scars through life.’
In chapters on the mists and myths of war, its reasons and realities and then the beginning and development of the rituals and emblems of remembrance, Ted Harrison asks many questions that will resonate with Quakers. Do the ceremonies ‘inadvertently provide armed conflict with a cloak of respectability? Does remembrance reinforce myths that serve to glorify conflict and make it more likely to happen in future? What, in the context of military service, does glory mean? What does it mean to be heroic? But most fundamental of all, what is the primary function of remembrance?’ He states ‘If remembrance does not serve as a warning against war and if it is not a reminder to the nation to rededicate itself to peace, it is futile.’ Strong words!
The purpose of remembrance
The main thrust of the book is that the meaning and purpose of remembrance has changed over the years since its inception following the horrors of the first world war.
When the rituals were first established the prime purpose was that ‘through remembering the victims of war, the living dedicated themselves to peace’. The first world war had to be the war to end all wars. Sadly, from the harsh reparations demanded of Germany by the victors, there emerged the nationalism that led, only twenty-one years later, to the second world war. Our forces have been involved in overseas conflicts many, and, for me, too many, times ever since. As the years have passed and memories have faded, the purpose of the commemoration has moved: from a determination to never experience again the pointless slaughter of 1914-1918 to one of pride and glory in those that ‘gave their lives for king and country’ in that war of long ago, and the more recent and now ongoing conflicts.
None of this is to detract from the valour of those comrades, friends and fellow servicemen who fought and died in battle, nor from those for whom the annual act of remembrance is a vital part of their grieving for much loved husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, and now, wives, mothers, sisters and daughters, especially those for whom those deaths are all too recent and raw. For them the wearing of the poppy and the silence, associated with remembrance, is a profound way of showing deep feelings for their war dead.
The 1914-1918 war
Next year marks the centenary of the start of the 1914-1918 war. It is nearly seventy-five years since the outbreak of the 1939-1945 conflict. Memories fade. The last serving soldier of the 1914-1918 war died in 2009 aged 111. The youngest, who enlisted in 1945, will be over eighty-five now. The veterans of that conflict are a dwindling band. Fewer and fewer know from first-hand the horrors of war. Fewer and fewer know, personally, anyone killed in those two wars. Thus, honouring the dead by the two minutes silence on Remembrance Day has little personal meaning for a great many not old enough for memories of war. The dead are known only from school history lessons. Those we are bidden to remember are the military.
Those killed or maimed at home working for the service of the country, the civil rescue services, the merchant seamen, those who stayed at home to feed and clothe us, who kept the ‘home fires burning’, whose names are not recorded on memorials, are forgotten. The nationwide acts of remembrance serve to remember, honour and glorify the military. The remembrance does seem to raise military service and dying in battle, as in time past, to the highest form of sacrifice – as a noble thing to have done.
Accepting the past
Recently, the French and German leaders stood side by side in acceptance of the past. Is it not now time that we acknowledge and remember the hurt and harm, slaughter and damage of past wars, however just and honourable the cause, done by our side? Both sides suffered horribly in the two world wars. There were wrongs committed by both. But it happened. We are at peace now.
Would it be too great a step, offend too many, be too great a dent to national pride, to have our former enemies’ leaders stand with ours, in the future, in mutual respect and remembrance, owning the suffering of us all in past conflicts?
The Royal British Legion has used the slogan ‘Wear your Poppy with Pride’ to promote its sales and, thus, the income for their services. There is something in me when I think of the horrors of war on both sides – the cost, the atrocities, the blunders, the self inflicted wounds of so-called friendly fire, the innocent civilians, the euphemism of ‘collateral damage’, the guilt held by many a soldier, the wounds and mental scars carried for life, the soldiers unable to readjust to civilian life with the consequential hurt of broken marriages and, in many a case, homelessness and much more on both sides – that makes me feel, in some small part, the slogan might better be ‘Wear your Poppy with Shame.’
I mean no disrespect to anyone. But the questions raised by Ted Harrison are there and must be faced. His is a strong and powerful book. It deserves wide attention from us all.
Remembrance Today: Poppies, grief and heroism. Ted Harrison. Reaktion Books. ISBN: 9781780230443. £20.
